Page 7 - The Portal magazine - June 2024

THE P RTAL June 2024 Page 7

The importance of

ecclesiastical music

Jackie Ottaway and Ronald Crane meet Sarah MacDonald

NE OF the interesting facts about the Ordinariate is that our Daily Offices are – more or less – the
Osame as that traditionally used in the Church of England. Nowhere is this more so than with Evensong.
Many colleges and most cathedrals have Choral Evensong regularly. It is the same Office as is in use within
the Ordinariate.

We thought it could be instructive to chat with
someone who works in that field of regular Choral
Evensong. So it was that we made our way to Selwyn
College Cambridge to interview Sarah MacDonald.
She has been Director of Music at the college for the
past twenty five years, the first woman to hold such a
post at Oxbridge.

After a lovely lunch in college, we settled in Sarah’s
room with coffee. She is Canadian and came to the
UK in 1992 as an undergraduate. Before that she had
studied the piano in Toronto. Her first interest was
in choral conducting. However, it is the organ that is
the gateway to being a Director of Music, so after her
conservatoire piano studies were complete, she took
up the organ.

She arrived in the UK as an organ scholar at Robinson
College in Cambridge. She took her degree in music.
She is proud to be one of those foreign students whom
generations of Home Secretaries hate! Thirty-five years
later, she is still here.

In 1999 she was appointed Director of Music at At Selwyn she has a choir full of undergraduates,
Selwyn College; a post she still holds. Although it is some of whom have had serious choral experience,
an important post, it is part-time, so since 2010 she while others have had no singing experience. They are
has also been Director of the Girl Choristers at Ely all the same age unlike Ely where there are children in
Cathedral. the front row and adults in the back row. At Selwyn the
average age is 18 to 22 with a couple of post-graduates.
Sarah is a composer, organist, pianist, conductor and They are a social, cohesive group. Some 82% have been
writes an article for the monthly American Organist educated in the state sector, and as a result, many have
magazine. She is still mildly shocked that she has been had no music since year seven.
appointed the next President of the Royal College of
Organists (she takes up this office in July). At Selwyn there is a mix of people who are discovering
liturgical choral singing for the first time, and those
Her two roles both involve ecclesiastical choirs, but who were cathedral or parish choir choristers who
they are very different. “The fundamental difference want to carry on singing at a high level while reading
is in the nature of the singers I’m working with.” bio-chemistry or Classics. So it is about building that
In Ely she has a front row of children who she is choral technique in the hope that they will carry on
teaching, from scratch, how to sing. But she also has and sing after Selwyn. Many of her former scholars
a back row of professional singers, who show up and are lay clerks in various places, and her Ely girls were
do their job. responsible for the first female lay clerks of six Ø